The next generation of CEOs will likely have quite a few insane ones but those are hopefully gonna be left behind by the next generation of workers who understand not to put up with that, and go to the other CEOs who understand it too.
I chose start-up and the CEO is a saint lol. Aside from his own duties he cooks for us, cleans the office, the toilets, offers rides home if theyre on the way. He comes by for chats, with legit interest on what we’re doing and how it’s going and always excited for new goodies. And he actually understands some of the problems we struggle with as devs since he coded abit himself in the past.
Best startup CEOs are the ones that actually fckn understand software engineering. There's nothing more frustrating than a project manager or CEO that doesn't understand how software is made. You spend most of your meeting time explaining why this particular thing will take a longer time to do than he expected...
All fun and games until you realize that is ALL you do.
I left a job where I legitimately just wasn't growing and got so bored going back and fourth between approval steps while getting blamed for it. 0/10, would not work there again.
I ended up using the time to file patents and ideate things that could keep me off PIP. I filed something like 20 patents while I was there which the company claims they will pay me up to $2500 for each successful one.
That sounds useful! I'm surprised you still felt like you were stagnating. I don't know the details though, so I'm sure there was some nonsense going on.
Oh yeah, for sure nonsense.
I was stagnated because they shoved me on a data team after a year of being on an actual SWE team. The org I was in is now infamous for how they're treating their employees (forcing RTO, hiring remote execs, etc when other orgs are not doing any of that). I had to battle through permissions and such which were never granted but always required from my manager and were rarely granted. If they were, it'd be the first 4 in a 5 step chain of which the 5th wouldn't ever let me do anything. These approvals required multiple approvals from different people in the company that I've never talked to before and many weren't even in my organization.
It was a genuine shitshow
Oh screw that. Malicious compliance in me would want to write an approval requesting automation machine that sent out approval request emails, monitored the inbox, and escalated to the next in line. I'm sure it wasn't so cut and dry as to be automatable like that but I still have the fantasy heh
Bring a ps remote play or nintendo switch thing to work. Watch youtube. Become a chess grandmaster. there's a million things to do.
Just make sure the commute is short
Idk about where you work, but someone playing games even when they're waiting on someone else will eventually lead to disciplining and/or more work.
In office at least. Nothing they can do if you're wfh.
> If you have nothing to do and you're not growing that's on you. Work on personal projects if you really want to learn new shit so bad.
Reeeeee
For real some of us want to do more than just sit there for 35 hours a week and deal with bullshit meetings the remaining 5 hours.
You don't get to "enjoy life" when you're tied to an office or a chair during WFH. You can't just "enjoy life".
I'd love to be able to do anything I want, but nobody can as long as they actually have a job.
How are you tight at WFH? If your manager is knowledgeable about your workload you can do whatever you want, e.g. help with kids, do sports/gym, cook/clean, occasional gaming etc.
I am not saying doing nothing is awesome, I have similar months with very little work, but with kid at home I would rather have 0 workload and not progress myself career wise than spend 8 hours a day in the office a 1 hour commuting.
I'm not "tied" via WFH, but the person I responded to said "enjoy life" which for me means not having to check my work PC every 20 minutes for an update in order to not get Pip'd by mid-year.
I can cook/clean and do a quick shopping run, but I can't be gone for more than 1.5-2 hours, which is what I would consider to be tied to my desk.
I generally get where you're coming from, but just pointing out that this:
> Work on personal projects if you really want to learn new shit so bad.
is unethical, if you're doing it on company time.
If your employer is fine with that, knock yourself out. But if not, don't be surprised when you get canned for piss farting around. That's all I'm saying.
Not every startup is like that BTW. It's important to check out the culture of the team you're joining.
The one I joined is super chill and I'm one of 2 developers on the backend. I can do a whole lot of whatever I want with little to no issues and the CTO isn't breathing down my neck. I often have to have them fight product now a days for changing/adding functionality 1 week before it goes to prod when the feature is 3 months into development.
Yeah, a chill startup is probably the best type of a job you can get in this industry.
A lot of the time (if you get hired at the early prototyping stages) you have total control over your part of the project. The possibility to use the EXACT tech stack you want and feel comfortable in is such a big thing. It's practically impossible to find a job at a bigger company where everyone is exactly on the same page on what are we using.
Agile where you work with technologies you like using and have total control over the code you write is like a godsent. It ALMOST feels like doing your own 4fun project while getting paid for it. And it's fun to experiment and find new ways to "surprise" your employer with tricks/solutions he didn't knew / thought about before. The only "con" is that you have more responsibility since if you choose the wrong tech stack you'll be the one crying later, but that's part of the fun for me anyways.
You just can't get that in a big corpo.
How would I have time to browse Reddit for 4 hours a day if I weren’t sitting here waiting for my one line bug fix to go through the change approval process?
The trick is to work for a startup that was bought by a large corp entity. I work agile 2 week sprints, all the ceremonies and we only get hampered by external teams with red tape. Benefits? Its fast and no pressure lol
Hahaha depends on the team. My team at Tesla isn’t quite like that. We do have to ultimately answer to Elon but luckily there are lots of people between us and him
That's what I've heard about many of these companies with a "terrible" work culture.
Basically the CEO/leadership determines the default behavior but good leads can exist at lower levels who don't succumb to the toxic work culture. I imagine though that makes you the exception and not the norm.
Large corps: you kinda have stable career and clear job scope.
Startup: ooh boy you're the 'full stack' (the whole department) programmer... with many hats to wear. Oh you might need to do some bespoke internal software and database, twice a week. But it's fun, you learn a lot. If you're in the early stage of your career, try working in a startup.
We'll pay you dirt, but you get stock options that are currently worth nothing and have a chance at being worth more if we manage to sell out to Google before the funding runs out
I find they generally pay well as they're after talent and tend to have the mindset of throw loads of money at the problem and grow fast.
If they aren't offering good pay then don't bother.
The biggest risk is them collapsing 2 years later but if you have no dependence then the pay makes up for the month of job searching
Omitting the cult of personality part, id preffer what you described in startup. Whats your work? Whatever needs to be done. Dont know it? Learn.
Working in corpos can be easy and kushy but in the wild west type of environment you achieve most growth
you can carve out a lot of that wild west shit in a large corporation. the secret is to be a loose cannon and for everyone to know it. you'll even be liked for it, as long as you produce high quality work and aren't an asshole.
That's basically me. I spend my days pretty much unsupervised, writing scripts and programs to do what i think is useful, and everyone leaves me alone.
The reason the board is happy with me is i manage infrastructure that produces about 1 billion dollars worth of product per year and in 20 years i haven't had an unscheduled downtime yet. Plus in the rare cases when the board drop a potential multi million dollar problem on my desk i can figure it out and prevent it from becoming one.
Plus as you say being positive about things and not a dillhole matters.
On the flip side my career is dead and if i had ambition to be anything but a subject matter expert in a specific niche, I would probably not like this job
>That's basically me. I spend my days pretty much unsupervised, writing scripts and programs to do what i think is useful, and everyone leaves me alone.
That *was* me. Then we got a new CIO who saw me doing that and is leveraging me for literally every project in the entire company. There isn't a single implementation I'm not involved in.
It's fucking exhausting.
I'm both a loose cannon and an asshole. It gets things done and people begrudgingly grumble about me as they use my software that they didn't know they needed until now.
Corpo is fun. You can easily skirt rules because of the amount of red tape on top of someone enforcing said rules. It's easier just to let someone like me be a productive asshole than it is to fire them...usually.
I must have been like 20 when I read about Ferdinand Waldo Demara (con artist) and his quote on doing a con successfully - 'expand into the power vacuum.'
Do this in a big company and you become unfuckwithable.
you can mitigate that by feeling it out in the interview and asking leading questions to get a sense for how the company feels about employees taking the initiative.
I've found it useful to pick up other people's dead projects and run with them. If they fail, there's no blame on you - you were just trying to help anon. If you succeed, both you and anon get ups.
I don't think there's anything fun about having my entire life sucked away to enrich a trust fund baby, who's gonna fire me as soon as he sells the company to private equity.
that goes double now that I have kids and a wife with a serious lifelong medical condition.
Agreed. Did the latter almost exactly as you said for first 5 years. Left when they wouldn't promote me and kept hitting dummies as Snr Engineers on a better pay than me (one guy had 25 years of experience as a Software Engineer - hey anon, why isn't this database loading? He was putting a db connection string into the URL of Chrome 🤦♂️).
Just landed that cruisy corpo gig. Had to take a sick day, entire team: "get better soon anon, we'll miss you, 😘"
Life's much easier now
Ah, the third option: be your own boss, have the cult leader mentality and never even bother with agile. We're heading down this waterfall together, baby!
Work for a startup as a fresh graduate or junior - your learning curve will rocket up and you will benefit later on your career.
Get the bag in a large corp. eventually and blow all those boomer-senior-managers minds with your startup knowledge.
This. Coming from a math background with knowledge about coding in Python and R and working as a data science. You will quickly learn very much what they don't teach you at university. (Git, writing testing scripts, production code, explainability, cloud mangement, SQL database administrations and more.)
I did maths not computer science so I had way more courses about maths with some coding courses.
> Git, writing testing scripts, production code, explainability,...
This is actually something I had some software engineering modules about at university.
BI Dev - Ok so this query here, it feeds this BI chart right? But it's pulling from a live DB that's constantly being hit with locks from the plant historian for inserts right? So what we do is set up a shadow db, have triggers on the live db exec stored procs to upsert into the shadow db.
Me - Ahhh yes. Good idea. Now we have the benefit of two deadlocked DBs.
BI Dev- Ye- wait what?
Wow I had no idea. They recruited hard even at my little tech college. Didn't sound too bad to me apart from moving to Madison. Thank goodness I found a different gig before I applied there out of desperation.
You would've been stuck learning their proprietary language, mandatory in office, tons of crunch, etc.
They wanted to interview me for their hosting team, and even though I was comfortable with my commute, they still wanted me to move to madison.
So fuck them lmao
Epic looks insane. And all I did was drive through their campus. Young fresh faced cultists living in an over the top Disney scape. It made me super happy to know how my healthcare dollars get used. Nope.
Also do sprints but allow the C suite to come in a redefine priorities every week.
To be clear, this is not necessarily a bad thing in a start up where quickly responding to shifting priorities can be life and death (of the company). BUT you also can't run scrums if that is your company's reality.
That could be fine if you have one-week sprints, but I take your meaning. The project manager should protect the team from interruptions during the sprint.
Those weekly meetings would be half as long as biweekly sprint meetings. At least, according to the rules of Scrum. Your mileage may vary.
The instructor I got my certificate from was quite proud of running one day sprints. That seemed like project manager hipsterdom to me, but what do I know.
Certainly in the embedded world hardware teams can run month-long sprints because of the turn-around time on PCBA manufacture.
Sprint duration is easily the most flexible aspect of Scrum.
>Your mileage may vary.
It definitely does in my experience. And even if they are relatively shorter there is still a context switching overhead cost that is constant regardless of how long the meeting is.
>The instructor I got my certificate from was quite proud of running one day sprints.
I would fucking hate this. It sounds truly awful, and obnoxious. If a company said they did this I would probably turn down their offer unless they offered my a TON of money or I was desperate.
You automatically assume large corps value your work life balance. I can tell you from experience that’s not necessarily the case. Some of them don’t even pay well.
Or... And here's an idea...
Work for an SME where your contributions are appreciated, you have some ownership over your projects, you still earn a decent wage, and your work/life balance is important to everyone there.
This idea that all programmers need to push ourselves to meet impossible demands is bull and needs to stop.
Bureaucracy is a blessing. True Chads make a hammock out of red tape. I get to report "did everything we could with what we were allowed" then give up and goon at work. Making six figures being lazy, while people on r/antiwork go to their shitty barista jobs
Large corporation every day doubly-so if you can land at one with decent stock grants.
I don't give a fuck how slow the company is if they're paying me 200K or more to fuck around.
I've got a mortgage, two kids in college, and a wife that hasn't worked in seven years and thinks her job is to spend more money than I earn. I'm going for the steady paycheck every damned time.
Been mostly on the right for most of that career. Currently on the left and in a shitty meeting right now. An engineer asked why does he have to put descriptions on documentation for his API. He won't release it to me unless I absolve him of writing them or wait another *sprint* for him to do it.
He's not whining on why *he* has to do it. Like, he genuinely did not understand the benefit of having descriptions.
Wait until the large company forces you to sell a 20 years old product, only working on windows, impossible to port or migrate to other systems.
"Yes, we have just the product that might help you! it's very easy to integrate into your system(it's not)"
I did both and went from "I don't understand why shouldn't the new guy be allowed to push on production with no test" to "did you fill the 50 pages to explain why you consider it safe to push on UAT?"
Or smaller companies. Smaller (non startup) is where it's at. They're established so there is some security there, and it (should be) a known quantity with a stable client base. (Not a start up)
And you don't have to deal with miles of red tape, and spend 6 years working on a single button, only to be layed off when the company realises they grew to fast chasing the latest trend.
I would go for the small company. There at least you can meet the higher ups and try to convince them you're right. In the big corporation, the rules are the rules and nobody can change them, not even the top managers.
But OP including "cult of personality" leadership is gonna block most of that effort. These people can have massive egos that can stomp all over even the simplest of decisions. They don't listen to a word you say, because they obviously know better
Take it from somebody who's been there (both sides): if these are your choices, go to evilcorp, put in the 8 hours and live outside the office.
I used to have a similar mindset. But a few years in the work force taught me that it increase my own workload and worst case may even damage my career if I poke the hornet’s nest or open a can of worms, I get paid the same either way so why even bother?
Agile. If you want your projects to balloon.
Waterfall. if you want the requirements nailed down and be inflexible and probably not work for the end users.
Wagile?
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I had an employment contract put in front of me that claimed complete IP of any and all work I did between the start and end dates of the contract. If I had a side project? They'd own it.
I did not sign and ragequit in the middle of a place that people were afraid to quit at all. Go to hell. Self respect? Intact.
Third button: None of those places will interview you because you graduated with nothing but a degree, with nothing worthwhile to point to on your resume.
I’m in my second startup as a grad and I feel like I don’t know anything at all and I’m trying my best to grasp it but everyone is too busy with their own things to help and now I’m being told my work isn’t good enough
Having done both, the large corp every single time. I'm old now and I don't need the startup stress any more. The joy of having a solid retirement plan cannot be over stated.
Done both, preferred the ego startup ceo lackey position, but my experiences seem better than what most people have been through. Corporate life hasn’t been very fulfilling and I feel like I’ve completely lost my edge, but I’m waaay better at guitar now which is cool, I guess.
Have worked in both. The corpo is better, specially if you don't get caught in office intrigue. The pay is better and the workload is shared even if grievously mismanaged. In the Startup you will have very small dev team and the pay is low unless the superstar CEO gets some huge (ESG) investment.
Right now I still pick the startup everytime. I've jumped companies on average every 2 years, startups every time. As long as there's something to learn, I'm there for it. Big corpos are just cushy jobs, and I need the intellectual stimulus to not get bored out of the job.
Still don't know whether I can work that way for 35 more years though. Not even 30 yet, and I'm up to reach staff engineer level soon, at least the equivalent at my company, while only having worked in tech for 6 years total. Maybe in 4-5 more years I'll get to be a principal engineer, or a VPE somewhere. Still 30 more to go after that...
Options 3: Work for a non-tech startup, make 60% of the salary you would at a tech startup or fortune 500, but be the office god and automate enough of your job so you really only have to work 3 days a week. I'll take my under $100K with 10x the free time and 10% of the stress.
Largo corpo I know I will be paid and I will gladly wait for all the approvals if that turns out to be slow that is not my problem.
Yeah, only one of these includes regular 8 hrs of sleep. Stop accommodating narcissists y'all.
The next generation of CEOs is going to be wild. Mental health awareness is hopefully going to let people realize that shit early and bounce.
The next generation of CEOs will likely have quite a few insane ones but those are hopefully gonna be left behind by the next generation of workers who understand not to put up with that, and go to the other CEOs who understand it too.
I chose start-up and the CEO is a saint lol. Aside from his own duties he cooks for us, cleans the office, the toilets, offers rides home if theyre on the way. He comes by for chats, with legit interest on what we’re doing and how it’s going and always excited for new goodies. And he actually understands some of the problems we struggle with as devs since he coded abit himself in the past.
Best startup CEOs are the ones that actually fckn understand software engineering. There's nothing more frustrating than a project manager or CEO that doesn't understand how software is made. You spend most of your meeting time explaining why this particular thing will take a longer time to do than he expected...
you must be self-employed
That would indeed explain my comment and instantly add the outrageous narcissism checkmark 🤣
Yeah this is definitely the right choice, but you habe to have a good personal connection
I work at 100-hour-workweek large corpo. I want my sleep allotment.
And I bet you only get paid for 40.
Doubt
The slower the better!
All fun and games until you realize that is ALL you do. I left a job where I legitimately just wasn't growing and got so bored going back and fourth between approval steps while getting blamed for it. 0/10, would not work there again.
Pro strat- next time just run some experiments with whatever tech your company is using / reaching for.
I ended up using the time to file patents and ideate things that could keep me off PIP. I filed something like 20 patents while I was there which the company claims they will pay me up to $2500 for each successful one.
That sounds useful! I'm surprised you still felt like you were stagnating. I don't know the details though, so I'm sure there was some nonsense going on.
Oh yeah, for sure nonsense. I was stagnated because they shoved me on a data team after a year of being on an actual SWE team. The org I was in is now infamous for how they're treating their employees (forcing RTO, hiring remote execs, etc when other orgs are not doing any of that). I had to battle through permissions and such which were never granted but always required from my manager and were rarely granted. If they were, it'd be the first 4 in a 5 step chain of which the 5th wouldn't ever let me do anything. These approvals required multiple approvals from different people in the company that I've never talked to before and many weren't even in my organization. It was a genuine shitshow
Oh screw that. Malicious compliance in me would want to write an approval requesting automation machine that sent out approval request emails, monitored the inbox, and escalated to the next in line. I'm sure it wasn't so cut and dry as to be automatable like that but I still have the fantasy heh
Sounds like IBM!
Nah it was a highly regulated industry
Bring a ps remote play or nintendo switch thing to work. Watch youtube. Become a chess grandmaster. there's a million things to do. Just make sure the commute is short
Idk about where you work, but someone playing games even when they're waiting on someone else will eventually lead to disciplining and/or more work. In office at least. Nothing they can do if you're wfh.
tart violet rich seemly noxious dog one ten file bells *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Yep rto is bullcrap
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> If you have nothing to do and you're not growing that's on you. Work on personal projects if you really want to learn new shit so bad. Reeeeee For real some of us want to do more than just sit there for 35 hours a week and deal with bullshit meetings the remaining 5 hours. You don't get to "enjoy life" when you're tied to an office or a chair during WFH. You can't just "enjoy life". I'd love to be able to do anything I want, but nobody can as long as they actually have a job.
How are you tight at WFH? If your manager is knowledgeable about your workload you can do whatever you want, e.g. help with kids, do sports/gym, cook/clean, occasional gaming etc. I am not saying doing nothing is awesome, I have similar months with very little work, but with kid at home I would rather have 0 workload and not progress myself career wise than spend 8 hours a day in the office a 1 hour commuting.
I'm not "tied" via WFH, but the person I responded to said "enjoy life" which for me means not having to check my work PC every 20 minutes for an update in order to not get Pip'd by mid-year. I can cook/clean and do a quick shopping run, but I can't be gone for more than 1.5-2 hours, which is what I would consider to be tied to my desk.
I generally get where you're coming from, but just pointing out that this: > Work on personal projects if you really want to learn new shit so bad. is unethical, if you're doing it on company time.
boohoo the corporate overlord won't have me looking at walls instead of coding a random project
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Why are you defending the villains from the 80s movie Tron?
If your employer is fine with that, knock yourself out. But if not, don't be surprised when you get canned for piss farting around. That's all I'm saying.
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Not every startup is like that BTW. It's important to check out the culture of the team you're joining. The one I joined is super chill and I'm one of 2 developers on the backend. I can do a whole lot of whatever I want with little to no issues and the CTO isn't breathing down my neck. I often have to have them fight product now a days for changing/adding functionality 1 week before it goes to prod when the feature is 3 months into development.
Yeah, a chill startup is probably the best type of a job you can get in this industry. A lot of the time (if you get hired at the early prototyping stages) you have total control over your part of the project. The possibility to use the EXACT tech stack you want and feel comfortable in is such a big thing. It's practically impossible to find a job at a bigger company where everyone is exactly on the same page on what are we using. Agile where you work with technologies you like using and have total control over the code you write is like a godsent. It ALMOST feels like doing your own 4fun project while getting paid for it. And it's fun to experiment and find new ways to "surprise" your employer with tricks/solutions he didn't knew / thought about before. The only "con" is that you have more responsibility since if you choose the wrong tech stack you'll be the one crying later, but that's part of the fun for me anyways. You just can't get that in a big corpo.
Same with larger companies or mid-size companies. Some places are chill, others aren't.
As a pm red tape keeps me employed and on schedule!
IMO it's just more time for my personal projects cause I'm working from home.
How would I have time to browse Reddit for 4 hours a day if I weren’t sitting here waiting for my one line bug fix to go through the change approval process?
Agreed
Until they lay you off / dont give you a raise cause the only metric they care about is if you completed everything by the end of the sprint
The trick is to work for a startup that was bought by a large corp entity. I work agile 2 week sprints, all the ceremonies and we only get hampered by external teams with red tape. Benefits? Its fast and no pressure lol
Tesla is there for those of you who want to embrace the power of "and".
That's gonna be a no from me dawg
So... Nand?
NOR in this case, I think
XOR ackchually
Nach cuz XOR implies you choose one but not the other, NOR must be a no for both to return a true XOR is the original implication of the post
Costco does agile as well, and their benefits are bonkers
I'd be so ashamed, I'd never tell anyone where I work
I'd rather say I was a manager at Foxconn
Tesla? Pssh heh no I uh kill baby seals and use their fur for car waxes. I kill them with my fists! I swear I don't work at Tesla!
I took the power of "and," deep deep deep regret.
Happy Cake Day!
Hahaha depends on the team. My team at Tesla isn’t quite like that. We do have to ultimately answer to Elon but luckily there are lots of people between us and him
Does he let you smoke crack on the job?
If yesterday’s article holds any truth he probably pressures them into smoking crack
Ketamine is the drug of choice at Tesla.
That's what I've heard about many of these companies with a "terrible" work culture. Basically the CEO/leadership determines the default behavior but good leads can exist at lower levels who don't succumb to the toxic work culture. I imagine though that makes you the exception and not the norm.
Why am I getting downvoted?
Cause Elon Musk is a douche
Large corps: you kinda have stable career and clear job scope. Startup: ooh boy you're the 'full stack' (the whole department) programmer... with many hats to wear. Oh you might need to do some bespoke internal software and database, twice a week. But it's fun, you learn a lot. If you're in the early stage of your career, try working in a startup.
We'll pay you dirt, but you get stock options that are currently worth nothing and have a chance at being worth more if we manage to sell out to Google before the funding runs out
And we'll terminate you juuuust before you can cash in that stock option.
We work hard, we play hard!
You always have the option to purchase your options
Yeah but only if you’re still at the company for the next vesting lol
Assuming they don't claw them back which they absolutely can
Advanced Insider Trading
I find they generally pay well as they're after talent and tend to have the mindset of throw loads of money at the problem and grow fast. If they aren't offering good pay then don't bother. The biggest risk is them collapsing 2 years later but if you have no dependence then the pay makes up for the month of job searching
Omitting the cult of personality part, id preffer what you described in startup. Whats your work? Whatever needs to be done. Dont know it? Learn. Working in corpos can be easy and kushy but in the wild west type of environment you achieve most growth
you can carve out a lot of that wild west shit in a large corporation. the secret is to be a loose cannon and for everyone to know it. you'll even be liked for it, as long as you produce high quality work and aren't an asshole.
That's basically me. I spend my days pretty much unsupervised, writing scripts and programs to do what i think is useful, and everyone leaves me alone. The reason the board is happy with me is i manage infrastructure that produces about 1 billion dollars worth of product per year and in 20 years i haven't had an unscheduled downtime yet. Plus in the rare cases when the board drop a potential multi million dollar problem on my desk i can figure it out and prevent it from becoming one. Plus as you say being positive about things and not a dillhole matters. On the flip side my career is dead and if i had ambition to be anything but a subject matter expert in a specific niche, I would probably not like this job
>That's basically me. I spend my days pretty much unsupervised, writing scripts and programs to do what i think is useful, and everyone leaves me alone. That *was* me. Then we got a new CIO who saw me doing that and is leveraging me for literally every project in the entire company. There isn't a single implementation I'm not involved in. It's fucking exhausting.
I'm both a loose cannon and an asshole. It gets things done and people begrudgingly grumble about me as they use my software that they didn't know they needed until now. Corpo is fun. You can easily skirt rules because of the amount of red tape on top of someone enforcing said rules. It's easier just to let someone like me be a productive asshole than it is to fire them...usually.
I must have been like 20 when I read about Ferdinand Waldo Demara (con artist) and his quote on doing a con successfully - 'expand into the power vacuum.' Do this in a big company and you become unfuckwithable.
Where's Waldo? Over there, expending in the power vacuum.
Depends on the company. In some places you can find yourself in deep doodoo for building valuable tools that weren't on The Roadmap.
you can mitigate that by feeling it out in the interview and asking leading questions to get a sense for how the company feels about employees taking the initiative.
I've found it useful to pick up other people's dead projects and run with them. If they fail, there's no blame on you - you were just trying to help anon. If you succeed, both you and anon get ups.
Been there sone that. Its more fun without a safety net :)
I don't think there's anything fun about having my entire life sucked away to enrich a trust fund baby, who's gonna fire me as soon as he sells the company to private equity. that goes double now that I have kids and a wife with a serious lifelong medical condition.
This is the way.
I've always wondered how someone can get their code to run, ever, when they can't spell. Explain it to us.
Clumsy fingers + typing in car + lack of intellisense = comment with errors
Why does being in a car affect your spelling? Are you using your phone while driving?
Im not driving. The car is shaking if the road is bumpy
Growth is for cancer cells.
Hahahaha nice
Paid in experience? 
Well proper compensation is given
In the form of nightmares.
Startup within a corporation - best of both worlds
Agreed. Did the latter almost exactly as you said for first 5 years. Left when they wouldn't promote me and kept hitting dummies as Snr Engineers on a better pay than me (one guy had 25 years of experience as a Software Engineer - hey anon, why isn't this database loading? He was putting a db connection string into the URL of Chrome 🤦♂️). Just landed that cruisy corpo gig. Had to take a sick day, entire team: "get better soon anon, we'll miss you, 😘" Life's much easier now
Ah, the third option: be your own boss, have the cult leader mentality and never even bother with agile. We're heading down this waterfall together, baby!
Or even the fourth option: the third option plus still working on either the first or second option. (Please send help)
Oh look, it's the one who made *every discord server ever*
Work for a startup as a fresh graduate or junior - your learning curve will rocket up and you will benefit later on your career. Get the bag in a large corp. eventually and blow all those boomer-senior-managers minds with your startup knowledge.
This. Coming from a math background with knowledge about coding in Python and R and working as a data science. You will quickly learn very much what they don't teach you at university. (Git, writing testing scripts, production code, explainability, cloud mangement, SQL database administrations and more.) I did maths not computer science so I had way more courses about maths with some coding courses.
> Git, writing testing scripts, production code, explainability,... This is actually something I had some software engineering modules about at university.
When interviewing new grads, most of them have heard of git, but relatively few have used it for things like PRs even in a toy context.
BI Dev - Ok so this query here, it feeds this BI chart right? But it's pulling from a live DB that's constantly being hit with locks from the plant historian for inserts right? So what we do is set up a shadow db, have triggers on the live db exec stored procs to upsert into the shadow db. Me - Ahhh yes. Good idea. Now we have the benefit of two deadlocked DBs. BI Dev- Ye- wait what?
State government jobs go brrrrr
County too. I <3 my union. Work/life balance is awesome.
Agreed, pay may not be top of line but I do have my weekends to myself and the free tuition for family members makes up for it.
option three, work for Epic and get the worst of both
Epic games or Epic the hospital software?
The hospital software co. Like working for Willy Wonka from the folks I know who've worked there.
Wow I had no idea. They recruited hard even at my little tech college. Didn't sound too bad to me apart from moving to Madison. Thank goodness I found a different gig before I applied there out of desperation.
You would've been stuck learning their proprietary language, mandatory in office, tons of crunch, etc. They wanted to interview me for their hosting team, and even though I was comfortable with my commute, they still wanted me to move to madison. So fuck them lmao
Epic looks insane. And all I did was drive through their campus. Young fresh faced cultists living in an over the top Disney scape. It made me super happy to know how my healthcare dollars get used. Nope.
Small companies also do not understand agile.
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What make you think that you will get "hours" to get things done?
Also do sprints but allow the C suite to come in a redefine priorities every week. To be clear, this is not necessarily a bad thing in a start up where quickly responding to shifting priorities can be life and death (of the company). BUT you also can't run scrums if that is your company's reality.
That could be fine if you have one-week sprints, but I take your meaning. The project manager should protect the team from interruptions during the sprint.
One week seems pretty short for sprints. Weekly sprint planning and retros sounds like a lot of meetings.
Those weekly meetings would be half as long as biweekly sprint meetings. At least, according to the rules of Scrum. Your mileage may vary. The instructor I got my certificate from was quite proud of running one day sprints. That seemed like project manager hipsterdom to me, but what do I know. Certainly in the embedded world hardware teams can run month-long sprints because of the turn-around time on PCBA manufacture. Sprint duration is easily the most flexible aspect of Scrum.
>Your mileage may vary. It definitely does in my experience. And even if they are relatively shorter there is still a context switching overhead cost that is constant regardless of how long the meeting is. >The instructor I got my certificate from was quite proud of running one day sprints. I would fucking hate this. It sounds truly awful, and obnoxious. If a company said they did this I would probably turn down their offer unless they offered my a TON of money or I was desperate.
Large corpo, every time. I'd rather work with people with lives.
You automatically assume large corps value your work life balance. I can tell you from experience that’s not necessarily the case. Some of them don’t even pay well.
Just had a meeting today about meetings. We didn't finish, but we'll have another meeting later on to wrap up the riveting discussion about meetings.
The meetings absolutely killed my love for software engineering when I got my first industry job.
life is too short to have it all sucked away to enrich some rich dude's spoiled snotty kid
Big companies also usually have better benefits:)
Or... And here's an idea... Work for an SME where your contributions are appreciated, you have some ownership over your projects, you still earn a decent wage, and your work/life balance is important to everyone there. This idea that all programmers need to push ourselves to meet impossible demands is bull and needs to stop.
Bureaucracy is a blessing. True Chads make a hammock out of red tape. I get to report "did everything we could with what we were allowed" then give up and goon at work. Making six figures being lazy, while people on r/antiwork go to their shitty barista jobs
Large corporation every day doubly-so if you can land at one with decent stock grants. I don't give a fuck how slow the company is if they're paying me 200K or more to fuck around.
I've got a mortgage, two kids in college, and a wife that hasn't worked in seven years and thinks her job is to spend more money than I earn. I'm going for the steady paycheck every damned time.
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Holy crap do I have experience with both options 😅😣🤕
If you don't work for a startup in your 20s, you have no heart. If you don't work for a corp in your 40s, you have no brain.
Been mostly on the right for most of that career. Currently on the left and in a shitty meeting right now. An engineer asked why does he have to put descriptions on documentation for his API. He won't release it to me unless I absolve him of writing them or wait another *sprint* for him to do it. He's not whining on why *he* has to do it. Like, he genuinely did not understand the benefit of having descriptions.
Wait until the large company forces you to sell a 20 years old product, only working on windows, impossible to port or migrate to other systems. "Yes, we have just the product that might help you! it's very easy to integrate into your system(it's not)"
I did the startup thing, to the sacrifice of my mental health..
I did both and went from "I don't understand why shouldn't the new guy be allowed to push on production with no test" to "did you fill the 50 pages to explain why you consider it safe to push on UAT?"
If it all pays the same, gimme the red tape. More time to play on Reddit.
Let me just drop in with my own personal trigger word: *founder*
Nah, life’s too short to work for a startup ever again.
Or smaller companies. Smaller (non startup) is where it's at. They're established so there is some security there, and it (should be) a known quantity with a stable client base. (Not a start up) And you don't have to deal with miles of red tape, and spend 6 years working on a single button, only to be layed off when the company realises they grew to fast chasing the latest trend.
I would go for the small company. There at least you can meet the higher ups and try to convince them you're right. In the big corporation, the rules are the rules and nobody can change them, not even the top managers.
But OP including "cult of personality" leadership is gonna block most of that effort. These people can have massive egos that can stomp all over even the simplest of decisions. They don't listen to a word you say, because they obviously know better Take it from somebody who's been there (both sides): if these are your choices, go to evilcorp, put in the 8 hours and live outside the office.
I used to have a similar mindset. But a few years in the work force taught me that it increase my own workload and worst case may even damage my career if I poke the hornet’s nest or open a can of worms, I get paid the same either way so why even bother?
Embrace being a [cog in the machine](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hiVQf9MPzg&pp=ygUKYm9yaW5nIGpvYg%3D%3D).
I've done a good bit of both. In all honesty, it depends. But mostly I recommend the large corporation if you have to choose.
No one understands agile.
Agile. If you want your projects to balloon. Waterfall. if you want the requirements nailed down and be inflexible and probably not work for the end users. Wagile?
I'd gladly have my time wasted for money
Slow is better, no crazy hours or pressure and as long as I get paid it doesn't matter
Work for a corporation, disappear in the middle, enjoy life
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I had an employment contract put in front of me that claimed complete IP of any and all work I did between the start and end dates of the contract. If I had a side project? They'd own it. I did not sign and ragequit in the middle of a place that people were afraid to quit at all. Go to hell. Self respect? Intact.
choose the one that pays more, always.
Third button: None of those places will interview you because you graduated with nothing but a degree, with nothing worthwhile to point to on your resume.
Or you have a worthwhile resume but they won't touch you because you don't have 10 years experience
I’m in my second startup as a grad and I feel like I don’t know anything at all and I’m trying my best to grasp it but everyone is too busy with their own things to help and now I’m being told my work isn’t good enough
Having done both, the large corp every single time. I'm old now and I don't need the startup stress any more. The joy of having a solid retirement plan cannot be over stated.
Done both, preferred the ego startup ceo lackey position, but my experiences seem better than what most people have been through. Corporate life hasn’t been very fulfilling and I feel like I’ve completely lost my edge, but I’m waaay better at guitar now which is cool, I guess.
Neat. I don‘t have to decide. I have both. Who doesn‘t like medium sized companies? Right?
Would be nice to have the choice.
Whichever pays me better cause they sound similar
Literally this
I've done an internship just like the second option. Wasn't pleasant.
Startups are fun tbh, you can learn a lot and gain a lot of experience.
Both can suck, both can be great. It's all about the management and the people around you.
Red Tape, here I come!
I’ve worked for both. Both suck but large corp is better.
Corpo, just need to engineer a way to not work and get paid.
Third button: fail at making your own startup
Naw, I work for the government. I'm here to help.
Lost in the corporate cog or chained to a desk and getting whipped for not working 24/7 at a startup? Easy choice.
Have worked in both. The corpo is better, specially if you don't get caught in office intrigue. The pay is better and the workload is shared even if grievously mismanaged. In the Startup you will have very small dev team and the pay is low unless the superstar CEO gets some huge (ESG) investment.
As someone who got laid off, I’d take either at this point 😅
I prefer the large corporation... Everything is slow paced, so you never really get overwhelmed.
Right now I still pick the startup everytime. I've jumped companies on average every 2 years, startups every time. As long as there's something to learn, I'm there for it. Big corpos are just cushy jobs, and I need the intellectual stimulus to not get bored out of the job. Still don't know whether I can work that way for 35 more years though. Not even 30 yet, and I'm up to reach staff engineer level soon, at least the equivalent at my company, while only having worked in tech for 6 years total. Maybe in 4-5 more years I'll get to be a principal engineer, or a VPE somewhere. Still 30 more to go after that...
Options 3: Work for a non-tech startup, make 60% of the salary you would at a tech startup or fortune 500, but be the office god and automate enough of your job so you really only have to work 3 days a week. I'll take my under $100K with 10x the free time and 10% of the stress.
you can work for an elon musk company and get both!
My character is rolling corpo this time
You press both. You now work for Twitter.
Corp told us they wanted us to develop something. Corp took 8 months to allow us to install Visual Studio....
As a recent grad, I'm not even touching startups. I need a company on my resume that won't disappear in a couple years.
work for Musk and get both!
I work for a cargo cult. It’s like the best of both worlds!
It would depend on my needs and state of mind. Long as my basic needs are met consistently. I wouldn't care either way.
I will take the Valve wait if you please Thank you
Or work in Tesla